LOS ANGELES—While Golden Road Brewing made a name for itself as the first canned craft beer in Los Angeles, President Meg Gill and Brewmaster Jesse Houck are reaching out to their San Francisco roots with a few select placements in the City by the Bay. With rotating taps at six locations, and two accounts for their packaged beer, Golden Road is taking the first baby steps into the Bay Area.
Both Gill and Houck spent many of their formative years in the beer industry in San Francisco, Gill selling for Oskar Blues and Houck brewing at 21st Amendment and Drake’s. These first placements reflect their deep personal connections to the city; it’s not part of the Golden Road agenda to aggressively move into NorCal any time soon. Each of the initial placements has been hand-selected and hand-sold by Gill, and Golden Road is working closely with the distribution team at Matagrano to keep their Bay Area presence close-knit and personal.
Says Houck, “Will we still have much work to do in Southern California to fulfill our goals, and our intention with these placements is to give back to the bars and people that gave us our start. The Bay Area is where I cultivated my love for beer and my palate, and it’s great to be able to come back in some small way.”
Adds Gill, “Selling in San Francisco is a romantic endeavor for us; Jesse, Tony, and I all met at different times but all in the SoMa neighborhood of San Francisco when I was first finding my footing in the beer world. We are literally retracing our roots and ideas that have built Golden Road.”
One of the featured placements will be at City Beer in SoMa, where Gill worked to introduce Oskar Blues cans into their renowned stock of craft beers. To celebrate this professional reunion, City Beer will be hosting a tap-takeover on April 11th from 8-10PM, featuring Point the Way IPA, Wolf Among Weeds, Get Up Offa That Brown and many more.
Golden Road will also be hosting a beer dinner on May 5 at Abbott’s Cellar, which is another personal touchstone for Gill, as she hosted her first-ever beer dinner at their sister restaurant, Monk’s Kettle back in 2008. Both Gill and Houck will be in attendance for the meal, which will feature a four-course meal, paired with Golden Road brews for $75 per person including beer pairings ($55 without). A limited number of seats will be released for the brewer’s table for $95, where diners will have the opportunity to chat in-depth with Gill and Houck and learn more about Golden Road.
Following this event, Whole Foods Market Potrero will be hosting the Golden Road team for a tasting on May 6th from 5-7 p.m., which will feature 10 Golden Road beers on draft, and all three canned selections (Point the Way IPA, Wolf Among Weeds and Get Up Offa That Brown).
City Beer, Toronado, Whole Foods Market Portero, Abbott’s Cellar, Monk’s Kettle and Dark Horse will all be carrying Golden Road’s (newly reformulated) flagship Point the Way IPA, with other limited edition brews scattered throughout, including Wolf Among Weeds, Golden Road Berliner Weisse, and It’s Not Always Sunny in LA.
